New Windows Phone 7 Bing Update to have many cool features

Microsoft will reportedly be releasing quite a bonanza of features for Windows Phone 7 users soon, by updating Bing Search to do much more than just search. As you know, all Windows Phone 7 phones are required to have a dedicated ‘search’ button which is technically a Bing only search. But Microsoft is planning to change it up a little to make the dedicated Bing Button much more useful in the near future (perhaps when the next updated ‘Mango’ is released?).

The new feature’s start with Bing Audio, a feature which you can use to listen to music, and get it recognize the song under 10 seconds exactly like Shazam currently does. We can see this being a big competitor to Shazam (even though it is free), but why would people get Shazam when you can just use Bing Audio (assuming the performance is on par), especially since it’s easy to access Bing Audio. Either way, once the song has been recognized by Bing Audio you can purchase/download the tracks from Zune directly.

The next feature is Bing Vision, which will use your smartphone’s camera to basically read barcodes and do optical character recognition which should potentially open up support for Augmented reality Apps, like the Twitter Augemented Reality that was shown off in MIX11. Have a look at the video below, for an App called Layar to get an idea of Augmented Reality.

Allegedly, theres also a turn-by-turn voice directions for Bing Maps coming as well, although we’re a little more skeptical of this one, but with Microsoft looking to revolutionize Windows Phone 7, you never know. Other features might also include a native Podcast Players which is useful and perhaps the best feature of the lot – voice-to-text for sending SMS’s without ever having to type! We’ve used this feature on certain Android Apps before, and they’re decent but not perfect so if Microsoft and make this feature work, and work well, they might just have a winning package when combined with the Mango Update which is expected by 2011’s end.

Founder and Chief Editor of Techin5, currently based in Melbourne Australia. Has always had a deep appreciation of Technology and how it helps people, which led to the birth of Techin5. You can follow me on Twitter at @jubbing and on Instagram